William Stafford woke up at four every morning for most of his adult life. He'd make coffee, sit in a chair with a legal pad, and write whatever showed up that morning. Some mornings it was a poem. Some mornings it was half a thought that didn't go anywhere. He kept this up for decades, thousands of mornings, without apparent concern for whether any given session produced something worth keeping.
When someone asked him what would happen if what he wrote one morning wasn't any good, he said something that still bothers me: "I lower my standards."
That sounds like a joke, or like the kind of thing a writer says to seem easygoing in an interview. But Stafford meant it literally. And I think he was getting at something most writing advice gets exactly wrong.
The writing world has an obsession with output quality. The whole apparatus of writing education (workshops, craft books, MFA programs) treats each piece of writing as a performance to be evaluated. Stafford treated his morning practice as something closer to breathing. You don't evaluate a breath. You just take the next one.
What happens when you write every day has almost nothing to do with getting better at sentences, though that happens too. It has to do with changing your relationship to the act itself. The resistance gets quieter. Not gone, but quiet enough that you stop negotiating with it every morning.
Your tolerance for bad work is the first thing that changes
Most people who try to write every day quit within two weeks, and the reason is almost never that they don't have time. It's that they sit down on day three or day seven, what comes out feels like garbage, and they take that as evidence they shouldn't be writing.
Stafford's move was to refuse that interpretation entirely. A bad morning of writing wasn't evidence of anything except that it was a particular Tuesday and that particular Tuesday was like that. The writers who sustain a daily practice aren't the ones who produce great work every day. They're the ones who've learned to be genuinely unbothered by producing bad work on a regular basis.
There's a story in Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland about a ceramics teacher who divided a class into two groups. One group was graded purely on the quantity of pots they made. The other was graded on quality, just one perfect pot. At the end of the semester, the quantity group had produced objectively better work. They'd made so many pots that they'd developed instincts the quality group never built, because the quality group spent all their time planning and theorizing and barely touched the clay.
I think about that story constantly.